Oregon Orangutan Picks Bears

And don't dismiss her pick as animal instinct either. The analytic apes I've consulted have crunched the numbers and screened hours of game film. They're all picking da Bearz as well, in a nail-biter.

Auster-cized

James Gibbons's survey of Paul Auster's career is respectful, but doesn't shy away from making severge critical judgements. It concludes with this devastating dismissal of Auster's latest novel: "Travels in the Scriptorium sucks out whatever life there is in Auster's invented universe, leaving a sterile vacuum of self-regard."

Other reviews of Travels , if I recall correctly, have been largely negative as well, though they haven't been so forceful in their assessments. Nor have Auster's critics been as clear about their reasons for finding this novel to be a metafictional failure when compared with Auster's acclaimed New York Trilogy. For Gibbons, Travels is too gimmicky. Its protagonist, a Mr. Blank, "has no real resonance" and remains a "stillborn creation," an intert thing to fill "the echo chamber that Auster has made of his career." Unlike Auster's best work, this book doesn't convey adequately "the self's vulnerability, the revelation that... we are little more than sentient ghosts."

Gibbons's gloss on Auster's Beckettian project in that last sentence is spot on. At his best Auster is adept at demonstrating the extent to which we are fragile subjects, "spectral ciphers" whose existence is precarious, supported by our fantasies about the Other, whom, it turns out, is virtual, the product of a consensual hallucination and thus as vulnerable as we are.

On a personal aside, I'm curious about what Gibbons thought of Leviathan. Presumably not much, since it's passed over in his survey. Leviathan is my personal favorite and the book of his that I know best. I've taught it a couple times and am doing so again this semester. I'm also writing about it in Senseless Resistance. What attracts me to Leviathan is the way it adapts self-reflexive elements from The Locked Room but opens itself to a world bigger than New York City. Auster dedicated Leviathan to Don DeLillo, and the book is in dialogue with Mao II. In order to adequately respond to Mao II's anxieties about authorship and violence in an era of media spectacle the book must beginning look at the State - America - and its role in the world at large.

How to have all men against you

George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People (2001):

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Wanderer and His Shadow"(1880):

How to have all men against you. -- If anyone dared to say now, 'Whoever is not for me, is against me,' he would immediately have all men against him. -- This does our time honor.

Other Voices, Public Works

Issue #45 of Other Voices, edited by Cris Mazza, is out. You can read my review of Christopher Grimes' Public Works: Short Fiction and a Novella on the reviews page of the Other Voices wesbite.

My review is rather short, due to editorial constraints, not choice. Other Voices is primarily a journal of new fiction, so it reserves only a few pages for reviews. The maximum number of words permitted was 750. I had much more to say about Grimes' short fictions, and my first version was about three times as long (and even in this draft I was aspiring to be concise).

At some point I expect to return to this material and incorporate it into a piece of literary criticism - a review essay rather than a book review. The distinction might not be immediately apparent to those not in the field, but it's a difference that matters.

On the topic of appearances, you might not know it, but I spent several weeks on this review, reading and rereading Grimes' stories, pinning down the ones that best exemplified the elements I wanted to foreground in my review, and, of course, writing and rewriting countless drafts of this essay. As I mentioned previously, Cris Mazza provided some excellent editorial assistance, enabling me to make cuts that were extremely painful. After spending hours crafting a few sentences, watching the words rapidly disappear as you hold down the delete key can be an agonizing.

But here's the really frustrating part: I've been told that since Other Voices is creative, not academic, journal my efforts won't count for much in terms of professional advancement. I can put the review down on my CV, sure, but book reviews, particularly ones appearing in a non-peer-reviewed publication won't count for much, if anything, in the eyes of most hiring-and-promotion committees. Such reviews are not regarded as real scholarship and might even be viewed as a diversion.

I appreciate the need to make a distinction between academic and non-academic writing, but given the systemic economic exploitation of intellectual laborers that is pandemic to academia, especially in the humanities and English departments in particular, there should be some credit given for efforts to write and speak to a non-specialized audience.

That's not likely to happen anytime soon. The paradox is that as university and scholarly presses publish fewer titles, the professions continues to raise the bar when it comes to the publications necessary to get - and remain on - the tenure track.

At least I'll know Public Works thoroughly when I teach it. If nothing else, the review could work to kickstart a class lecture. That's assuming, of course, that the teaching opportunities remain there. One shouldn't presume anything, particularly when it comes to work and universities, both public and private.

Against The Day

Pynchon is back, and his new novel, Against the Day, finally arrived in my hands today. It's been sitting in the UIC English Department offices since last Friday, which was frustrating, but allowed me to remain focused on the tasks at hand over the past Thanksgiving weekend.

I've only had a chance to read twenty pages, and I've savored each one so far.

When Mason & Dixon came out (has it already been nine years?!?1?) I read the entire book in two days, but I was employed only part-time, and out of school, then.

Now, there's a stack of papers to grade, and much end-of-the-semester work to be done, so here's the deal. For each paper graded, I get to read three pages of Pynchon.

Ain't it funny how an teacher of American lit feels slightly guilty about taking time out to read from the latest work by America's greatest living novelist?